community arts

For a long time I’ve been meaning to write about the Cows of Georgia. I’ve been meaning to write about them, because they were one of the ubiquitous features of our trip to Georgia last summer. But that was a long time ago. So many ridiculous items (‘coups’, orange-haired presidents, dictatorial referendums, etc.) have taken their places on the daily agenda since then that the cows just sort of got left by the side of the road, so to speak.

In fact, during our trip, the cows were more often occupying the center of the road than the side of it. But since the time I decided to write about the Cows of Georgia and the time I actually got around to writing about them, I’ve had a lot of time to wonder why it is that I find cows so fascinating.

Picture: “Hanging out the Laundry” (it’s a box)

I have an ex-boyfriend who grew up in a small town in Germany who once told me he had always wanted to have a cow for a pet. At the time, I thought that was sort of strange. Now, however, I can see the attraction. In addition to the side-benefit of daily dairy products, cows are definitely more human-friendly than cats, and while not quite as cuddly as doggies, they’ve got big, beautiful eyes that they obligingly turn in your direction the minute you point a camera at them – unlike doggies, who instinctually manage to look in the other direction the second you press the shutter (or tap your touch screen).

Picture: Collage with Cows

The cows in the collage above are photocopies of paintings I did of (duh) cows. They are actually pretty small (about 10x15cm), and I did them all in one sitting because I was tired of people looking at me like I had two heads when I didn’t nod yes when they asked, “So, you do oil on canvas?” I made a dozen or so, and hung them in a “3-person-exhibit” at the Gümüşlük Art House shortly after I had first moved to Bodrum. The other 2 ladies exhibiting were as suprised as I was when a French tourist came in and bought almost all of them. “What? Don’t you have cows where you come from?” asked one of the ladies. All I could do was pocket my cash and smile. “Actually, we do.”

But we don’t have them on the beach. At least not on Long Island.

Kadıkalesi is the first place I ever saw a cow wandering on the beach, and I was fascinated. It was not an uncommon occurrence, either. In the wintertime, when the beaches were empty of tourists, they’d be hanging out with their kankas, enjoying a bit of beach grub.

I never did see a cow on the beach during the summer tourist season, but I did get to wondering, and after a couple of cows made their way onto trays that formed a wall installation with a couple of naked Greek statues and some Ottoman women on their way to a hammam (and I am really sorry I don’t have a picture of that), I finally did a picture I called “Cows on the Beach”. It was inspired in part by the witty lady from the exhibit in Gümüşlük.

Picture: Cows on the Beach

But away from the cows of the Aegean and on to the cows of the Black Sea…

Picture: Cows in the Highlands

Yes, there were cows hanging out by the sea in Georgia, and in “the lush Georgian highlands”, but like the ones in Turkey, they were solitary, or with at most a single friend or family member. The ones inland on the way from Üreki to Kutaisi were in herds.

But herd of cows on a highway? Well, no actually…

Returning from Kutaisi, we had apparently hit cow rush hour, and the traffic was horrendous. It was moving in a maddeningly slow pace, and what’s worse, in the wrong direction.

I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I just don’t have the energy to tease it out. It’s bayram, and the heat wave from Libya has arrived at our doorstep and is expected to last until the end of the holiday.

And then there’s another national holiday coming up, I’m sure, in a few weeks, marking nearly a year since we started out on our Road Trip to Georgia. In fact, the anniversary is not to mark our road trip – but don’t get me started on that, because I don’t have the energy for that, either. Enough to say that last year, we had accidentally decided to take a holiday abroad at a very interesting time. This year, we’re doing it on purpose. And when we get back home, all I want is for everything to be normal again. And I don’t want to have to wait until the cows come home.

…

I hope you all have enjoyed joining me on this vicarious, virtual trip around Georgia and some of Turkey. I know I promised lots of things that I didn’t deliver on (like a description of Zafer and the Laz Beach Party at Limanköy, and more photoshopped bathers, for example), but like I said, and as you know, a lot of things have happened over the past 365 days. To keep up with me on this journey we call – well, this journey we call something or other – feel free to sign up for my Blog, which, I promise, will from now on no longer engage in 10-part series of anything.

And for now, just a few more cows…

Picture: Cows on the Highway

Picture: Cows Still on the Highway, Receiving a Good Talking To

Picture: Cows on the Highway (but at least heading in the right direction now)

This beautiful work by an art student in New York and my wish to share it with you has finally put an end to my procrastination.

After the hectic energy and motion involved in getting together my most recent bit of installation art, “Have Your Photograph Taken as an Ottoman Princess”; followed by total paralysis in response to the piece’s sudden removal from the Bodrum Biennial under mysterious and rather disturbing circumstances; and a gradual thaw that involved slow travels along the Mediterranean coast and fast times with friends and family in New York, which, gratefully, brought me back to myself… well, let’s just say, things are back to normal – if you can call editing a magazine, writing a grant proposal and cooking a Turkey – all at the same time – normal.

A propos this posting, the grant proposal had to do with a project for a workshop on ‘community arts’ here in Bodrum. That idea was prompted by the experience of putting together the ‘Ottoman Princess’ exhibit – and then having it taken down. As a piece designed to raise awareness about violence against women – all kinds of women – and the Turkish legal system’s tacit acceptance of this violence through court decisions that reduce the sentences of the perpetrators (usually husbands/ex-husbands and boyfriends/ex-boyfriends), I thought I would have the support of women in realizing this exhibition. In fact, I had a lot of women – as well as men – support the piece financially, but finding a woman’s advocacy group willing to contribute to the content of the piece was difficult. Moreover, it eventually became clear to me that the decision to remove the piece was due to a combination of fear and mistrust – by women!

Luckily, however, there have been a few women (you know who you are) who have given me the encouragement to try and find another place to exhibit the work and, just as important, if not more important, to continue doing work that keeps me in the world rather than just in my studio, and to encourage others to do the same.

Reading up on ‘community arts’ confirmed my belief that there are two things that art is really good for. The first is self-expression, and the second is community expression. A lot of times, the second type of expression comes more in the form of ‘expression about community’ than ‘self-expression by members of the community’, but when you manage to get both of those things together, well, there you’ve really got aesthetics in the original sense of the word, which had as much to do with moral satisfaction as it did with sensual satisfaction.

Back to where this post started out: the clay sculptures created by students in the Forensic Sculpture Workshop, a class offered through the New York Academy of Arts’ Continuing Education program, are reconstructed facsimiles of unidentified crime victims that “capture the likenesses of unknown citizens who faced cruel and untimely deaths from a variety of gruesome circumstances” created by students and displayed in the university’s windows in the “hopes that someone walking by the university windows will see a face and recognize it.” As the program’s director explained to the Huffington Post, the program is “the perfect marriage of art and science. Having students use art and their extensive knowledge of anatomy for a bigger purpose and real world application to help the community at large was an opportunity worth waiting for and one we hope to replicate for years to come.”

I find poetic the fact that the ‘community’ being represented here is a community that, up until these art students became involved, had lacked representation in the literal as well as the figurative sense of the word.

And I’m impressed that this all took place in a continuing education program. Presumably, all the students in the class could have chosen to take a sculpture class that would have allowed them the opportunity to focus more on their own self-expression, but instead they chose to focus on the expression of someone else.